What’s more, Google told users that they were protected by Safari’s default settings. From the WSJ’s Feb. 17 piece:

Until recently, one Google site told Safari users they could rely on Safari’s privacy settings to prevent tracking by Google. Google removed that language from the site Tuesday night.

The discovery comes as Google is taking heat for plans to combine user data across its multitude of services, such as YouTube and Gmail. The company, like Facebook and others, insists that no personally identifiable information is being stored or sold to advertisers. Google used that same line in responding to the WSJ report. Can users be blamed if they’re now wary of that promise?

What happens when Facebook, a company that already committed a serious privacy infraction that led to an FTC settlement, disappoints shareholders?

Google and Facebook offer valuable services to millions of users for free. In turn, they’re able to deliver ads based on some of their users’ Internet activities. The more information they have about you, the more effective the ads may be. But at what point does that data mining become an invasion of privacy?

Until now, regulators in European countries have been far more stringent in protecting user information than those in the U.S. In the wake of the latest privacy firestorm, that could change.

Tamara Chuang covers personal technology and local tech news for The Denver Post. She previously spent 10 years doing the same thing for The Orange County Register before taking a hiatus to move here and become a SAHM to a precocious toddler.

Laura Keeney is a business reporter with The Denver Post, covering aerospace, aviation and biotech. Over the last two decades, she's covered everything from agribusiness to punk rock. Keeney holds an AACSB-accredited MBA from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.